ITT: Villains who hid in plain sight

you are so right
i was mentored by a woman just like this (not as successful as Joyce, but the exact same type of cold); her behavior would have put any "shark" male businessman to shame

Sorry. This is more of an opinion post, though, since she is never actually "revealed" as an antagonist (because she isn't one, except in the abstract).

She's obviously a manipulative lying bitch but her lying about that was strictly Evarts opinion. Considering the other information you can find out about the pale I'm inclined to believe she's being truthful about that bit.

so what's she up to?

thanks for the reply, I was about to remove this from my wishlist

This is also very plausible. My "distrust" of her upon reflection colours this analysis. You're right: It is very possible (probably even the most likely) that Evrart was just lying about this to put you further on tilt. She may have been completely truthful about the pale sickness, or she may have just exaggerated it a bit for dramatic effect. "Open to interpretation" is definitely how most would describe much of her dialogue.
Well, I think she's mainly probing Harry for information about Evrart's plans, and for details about the investigation. She wants to know how the RCM will approach the Krenel situation, and to gauge what kind of outcome he'll ultimately set in motion for Revachol. It's also possible that (on top of her pragmatic reasons for deceiving him) she just enjoys picking this eccentric man apart (to analyse him, then manipulate based on her analysis). That's a tendentious reading on my part, though -- no /real/ textual evidence to support it.

You're welcome. Definitely don't remove it; it's very good. Nothing major's been spoiled in this thread so far, and a lot of the game is 'spoiler-proof' in its intricacy.

>lose absurd amounts of money to save people who hate you
>absolutely nothing to gain out of it but do it anyway
She was no villian, she was based and discopilled

OP I think you're projecting some negative past experience with a manipulative woman onto her and magnifying her "faults" to a huge degree but your posts are very eloquent and I like reading them

>negative past experience with a manipulative woman
I don't actually have any, thankfully. Only dated one woman, who (fortunately) was very sweet. I was just raised with the Internet, and so exposed to the red pill/incel forums from an early age. That definitely affects how I see women, both real and fictional; so, yes, these posts are by no means impartial. This is all just one guy's interpretation.

Kind of sad how hard this game crumbles in the second half, definitely peaked at interrogating Klaasje and then went all downhill from there.

Also really hate how slow it is to just move around.

she literally didnt do anything wrong , that union faggot and the commie sniper are the villains

>interrogating Klaasje
this is the moment that won me over

Yea, it was definitely one of the best moments in recent gaming history for me, the way they handled the whole thing was fucking perfect, and came quickly after the previous high point for me Doing the autopsy and finding the bullet

Which is why I'm so annoyed with how it all goes down afterward As much as I like the pale as a concept and how it affects the world around you, I didn't like how it takes over the entire fucking game and ruins the murder mystery

I wouldn't say it crumbles, but it's certainly not as well executed as the first half. Forcing you to do side quests by gating the rest of the game behind a skill check was tedious but the tribunal and island more than made up for it.

The sniper kicked things into motion but she hired a squad of notoriously unstable war criminals and organized a scrab protest explicitly to break the dock workers. They brought it on themselves but she's entirely complicit, and peaces the fuck out instead of stepping in when things get heated.

>tell Kim I don't think he died from the hanging
>later Inland Empire directs me to the bullet
>Kim tells me that was a damn fine piece of detective-ing

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She hired thugs to deal with thugs, which is not entirely unreasonable, especially when the union is what it is.
>She noped the fuck out when people started getting killed
And that's an entirely sensible thing to do, an unknown assailant killed one of yours and violence is about to escalate, that's no position for a diplomat anymore.

Honestly the worst thing you can say about her is that she's callous, which is hardly a true fault.

The pale rift isn't what sends the communist sniper insane, it was decades of isolation, extreme ideological justification for criminal activity and war-time survivor mentality accelerated by the neurological rot of a gigantic cryptid that made him the way he is. The whole game is poking fun at people that take their political identity too far and he is the poster child of it all.

>Inland Empire check has the corpse tell you exactly how he died.

Second best skill, after Shivers.

Yea, Kim was a cool sidekick character and a really well done foil for Harry, part of why I really wish that in the end you could get a better ending than Harry just being on a constant loop of the misery he goes through this game due to his pale affliction, when you're playing a straight-lace cop Kim really makes you think you can pull it together in the end, but that turns out impossible

I'm under the impression that the "cryptid" is a manifestation of the pale, but that's little more than an opinion.

not really, if the union people just refused to work and let the new workers begin working instead her measures would be unjustified but they literally stole her company's port and blocked entrance to the new workers.
she was simply reclaiming property from violent criminals and thieves.

if i was her i'd have the mercenaries gun down all the people occupying the port on sight just for the commie rhetoric

It was the peak of the game no doubt because the game sort of broke its own rules, but I have to criticize the writers for the moment "Volition" stepped in because all moral ambiguity was lost that exact moment forward. I shudder to think there were people who let Klaasje off the cuff. There's no grey zone, that entire section becomes a Rorschach test rather than a morality test. Are you a confrontation person whom is capable of doing what needs to be done or do you let your emphatic side get the better of you.

She hired a squad of invulnerable mentally unstable hyperviolent rapists and murderers to take on what is essentially a tiny street gang and a large unarmed black man. The violence and deaths they caused were entirely what they were hired for, and she left after gathering as much information about Evrart's plans as she could without being linked to the scene of an absolute slaughter of the pedestrian populace. I don't think she's a villain but she did ethically disgusting things for unsavoury reasons.

What makes you think that? The Pale is described as a palpable nothingness that is swallowing existance, not a hell-dimension that demons pour in through. Kim managed to take a photograph of it for the other police officers to verify that it wasn't a mass hallucination either. It was a ridiculous scene but it was played completely straight.

>a tiny street gang and a large unarmed black man
The Union numbers in the hundreds. The metaphor of the hornet and the bees is initially about how the hornet (mercenaries) can kill dozens of bees (dockworkers) without working up a sweat but when you try it on Evrart he tells you how the bees kill the hornets by overwhelming them with numbers, and then thanks you for sparing him having to order that sort of bloodbath

Going by the conversation with the cryptid, both it and the pale were the result of human thought.

So be it but understand that you are advocating mass murder on a huge scale for ideological reasons. Evrart was no better for setting the situation up with his brother in the first place but everyone was in the wrong, and so are you.

To me it was more of a matter of whether or not you just blindly follow rules without any kind of assessment of the situation, or if you could think for yourself and determine whether or not there was any meaningful benefit to arresting Klaasje (there isn't). Comes down to whether or not the rules exist to serve the people, or the people exist to serve the rules. I prefer the former.

>She hired a squad of invulnerable mentally unstable hyperviolent rapists and murderers
She hired mercenaries, good ones, that did as they were told. What the fuck do you expect from mercenaries that are available to hire for such operations as breaking a union of violent thugs? Keep in mind they were sent to pressure the union, not gun everyone down, and that it was the death of one of their own that caused the escalation. It's not as if that shit was planned.

Both sides are shit, the game doesn't favor any ideology save perhaps for "Revacholian Nationhood" and even then it's just minor.

The pale has palpable effects on reality though, it's not much of a stretch to think it could give form to thought, the game is utterly ambiguous about the whole thing, but cryptids in general are treated much the same as the pale.

The hardy boys were Evrart's strike force and Measurehead was his muscles, and without Harry and Kim threading the needle with a couple of their shots at exactly the right time they'd have all been gunned down in seconds. You can fuck it up for yourself and see how poorly they do on their own. Evrart is talking shit 99% of the time and is just projecting strength.

not ideological reasons they stole the port company's property, since there is no centralized government or law enforcement in that fictional country (or else the police would have cleared out the thieves from the port) the owners have to do it themselves

I disagree wholeheartedly. The pale affects things the way deleteting parts of the universe affects things. It's never for a second sold as an alternate reality, just an overwhelming nothingness. The silence in the church is the closest we come to experiencing it. Cryptids aren't supernatural in their nature, it just means an undiscovered species. If you could point to a single line of dialogue that supported a link between the two I wouldn't be so dismissive but there isn't

Thought this was margaret thatcher at first glance desu

There is no logic as to why it could talk, or think along the lines humans do, it is definitely a supernatural occurrence and I find it hard to believe the two are unrelated.

not him but I vaguely remember some checks regarding pale or the cryptids getting bonuses for doing stuff related to the other
Or maybe it was a thought cabinet

No, see, I'm telling you're wrong. Don't double down on your original wrong point to try and argue it again. The Union has more men than just what is presented in the game and the issue is that they will get involved because neither Joyce nor Evrart would give a damn if the violence was only going to be contained to a dozen people at most.

They could have glassed the surface of Martinaise with napalm and firebombs to get their property back and that would have been a morally dubious effort to reclaiming lost profits aswell.

That's probably because she's fashioned after her, in word and deed.

>no logic as to why it could talk
The whole conversation is Inland Empires. Harry is talking to himself, in his head, while the Phasmid is investigating him.

all in all, with her, Klaasje, Dora and others this game was very redpilled on women
there were only 3 female characters portrayed in positive light and all 3 of them were legit autistic/maladapted

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Okay well I'm telling you you're not and it's stated that the Hardie Boys are the union's police force and lawbringers, and that Measurehead is described as Evrart's personal muscle but if you want to use the word of Evrart Claire on the totally unbiased topic of his projected strength in time of war then be my guest I don't give a shit

You do understand that the whole idea of those voices in Harry's head are the result of his exposure to the pale, right? The pale isn't just some void of nothingness, it has a lasting influence on whatever it touches, it manifests itself noticeably in those that are exposed to it.

Fact is, the whole thing is a supernatural occurrence and the only other such factor in the setting is the pale, so I find it hard to believe the two are utterly unrelated, especially since that sniper was in reasonably close proximity to the other manifestation of the pale you find in the game.

>there were only 3 female characters portrayed in positive light

and by those 3 i mean the dice maker, the cryptozoologists wife and the fisherwoman with a sword

I suggest you go back, play the game again and actually read the dialogue this time. You don't have to come back and tell me you're wrong because I already know.

Just like Pepe, the beauty of this game is that it reflects the minds of the people that play it, and no two people got the same experience

No, the only explicitly supernatural voice is Shivers. Inland Empires is an overactive imagination.

no they couldnt because that would destroy their port. what they did is the only possible response to what evartt did.
honestly hiring enough mercenaries to gun down the thieves is probably too expensive and a gunfight in the port could damage their property so having the mercenaries take their time is probably the wisest choice.

evartt is the villain because he and his people stole the port and the sniper is the villain because murder

You're right on with a lot of this. She's an old guard representative of Capital -- she has a sense of honor and a wistful kind of patriotism, along with (what seems like) a deep love for Revachol and what it represents. Functionally, though, she is Capital incarnate -- just by doing her job, she's acting in the interests of aggressive corporate expansionism and shady multinational agendas. I feel that this is why Joyce is so interesting; an ultraliberal who lived through the shift from monarchy to "rule by Capital" and has appropriately complex opinions informed by this experience. Her demeanor seems like: "Yes, what (we're) doing might be callous, but what's to be done about any of it?"
This is where the question of choosing sides becomes tricky. Recall how post-revolution Revachol is ruled by a Coalition of industrialized nations, and how it's basically kept alive as a place for big corporations to operate with ultra-low tax rates/restrictions -- an "economic free zone" in which corporations' word is ultimately law. If you consider how stacked the odds are against labor in this scenario, the Union (and even Evrart) can start to look a lot more sympathetic -- they've adopted thug tactics in order to compete with the hard-line approach of the Occident multinationals. Who else would they have learned it from? When you consider only Martinaise, they're just a bunch of mobsters, but in the grand scheme of this world they're tiny and badly out-gunned. Much of the thuggery and 'unlawful' they're guilty of is the result of the rules of the game having been set by their 'opponents' (the Coalition and its attached lobbies). Joyce might only appear as a neutral figure (maybe even a "good person" to some) because she operates within the status quo, meaning that the world is 'used to' her brand of misbehavior. (Not a socialist or labor advocate in any form whatsoever, for the record; just played the hell out of this game and thought about it a lot).

I suggest you go back, play the game again and actually read the dialogue this time. You don't have to come back and tell me you're wrong because I already know also you're gay

So anons did you let Ruby escape?

No, the fact that your thoughts manifest themselves as conversations in your own head, with personalities and flair, is the result of the pale. Shivers is certainly a more supernatural one than the others, but that's only a matter of scale.

There is no single real villain in this game. All characters, even the murdered, are victims of their circumstances each to a different extent.
I was liked how everyone kept screeching about how this game was pushing different agendas, whereas even the murder itself was just an act of primal jealousy completely unrelated to politics.

Jesus, forgive the typos, I am ESL and also drunk atm.

user stop, you'll just bring back the autists screeching about centrists with that kind of talk.

You're judging their value as people on how much they hindered your investigation. Was the old woman that lets you stay in her shed a terrible person because she withheld minor information about Ruby? Was Ruby a terrible person for trying to hide from you after transporting drugs for her own survival in an economically ravaged town? Was the phone-in MMORPG computer programmer evil? The raver on the ice? The old cleaner woman, or the real estate agent? The homeless youth that was painting graffiti in a run down part of town? The mother of the twins? The girl in the bookshop? Your former police coworker and the two radio assistants? Measurehead's thots? I'd like to hear your reasons

This and this. I like the complexity of the relationships and agendas that the game presents because just like in real life, it's very hard to tell who's "right" and who's "wrong". Everything is linked and there are shitty actions from all sides. Seeing posters argue about the motivations and morality of the characters shows that the game did a pretty good job of making something interesting and with a bit of depth.

thankfully all the evil cunts were also shown as strong/independant so the "gaming media" didn't pick up on that

>culprit is a 80 year old literal incel obsessed with politics that was mad that a gigachad was banging his slut of a waifu

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No. What is it with the faggots on this board not reading things in a game built upon reading?

>Inland Empire
>imagination
>voice inside head
>Shivers
>supra-natural
>voice outside head

Oh, and if Harry's voices are Pale affliction then he magically has it completely different to the way it's portrayed everywhere else in the game.

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And along with the cryptid revelation/dialogue the whole ending sequence was fucking soul crushing.

>whereas even the murder itself was just an act of primal jealousy completely unrelated to politics.

not to mention the sniper was already brainfucked by the bug when he made the kill and couldn't think straight for who knows how long

that said, the mercs were villains

All else aside measureheads thots are hardly a positive portrayal of women user. I think most of them just hardly count since they have so few interactions. Ruby isn't a poor example because of hiding from you, but because everything else you learn about her during the course of your investigation.

t.

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Read what I said again and this time try and comprehend it instead of just immediately repeating your previously held ideas.
>Oh, and if Harry's voices are Pale affliction then he magically has it completely different to the way it's portrayed everywhere else in the game.
Different how? It seems to me the effect they have on him ends up manifesting rather similarly to how it does with other characters, imagine how it must look to Kim while Harry is having this long back and forth between Rhetoric, Volition and Conceptualization, must be rather similar to how your conversation with that trucker goes, no?